Endurance.Net Ridecamp Archives

Hi Chris;

 Boy I would have been really upset if I went to a clinic and someone messed around with my good home raised filly. That's the whole beauty of raising a baby, you don't have to try to fix someone's abused messed up mental case. Which I have done more than once and no longer care to try.  Good for you for being the advocate for your horse, and asserting yourself. Keep following your gut feelings!  That stepping over Christmas lights, what's the point of that? What if you step on them and they explode? What does that teach the horse? Probably not to trust you to step over suspicious objects. And the ugly man sitting at the end of the poles? At this point in my life, I'd spook too.  Brother.

  I was reading in one of those bubble-gum horse magazines that you see in the grocery store, about how to fix your horse that spooks on the trail. The rider was demonstrating in a huge field, how to get his big appy with splint boots to get near a "bucket" laying there, by cantering around and around it in circles.  As if any horse I know has any fear of a bucket.  That's a whole hell of a lot of help when you encounter a grocery cart on some single track cliff, especially when the tarp covering it starts to blow.  I got better training advice by watching "Finding Nemo". Yup, we keep on swimming, swimming, swimming, what do we do? We swim, swim, swim.    Yeah, I went to a half dozen of those clinic seminars, come home, get my good old NATRC/endurance  trail mare in the round pen and do the natural thang. She turns to me and clearly  ( to a horse psychic or friend) says,  "Uh, what do you think you are doing? Shouldn't you be getting me my supper?"  That's an Arab for y ou.   

 Beth

(P.S. At our NATRC clinics that we hold locally, we just have them ride up and down hills, maybe step over some real logs, cross a real stream, and try backing up a slope and that seems to give us enough material to coach newbies, plus we teach them how to take a pulse and what criterias mean. Stuff like that. No ugly men, or light bulbs)

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The very essence of our sport is doing the trail as quickly as practicable,
while keeping one's horse fit to continue.  Taking the clock out of the
equation makes it another sport altogether.  The challenge is how to keep
the sport what it is while honing our skills (both as riders and as those
in control roles) in detecting where "the edge" is for each horse so that
we don't cross it. 
~  Heidi Smith
ridecamp.net information: http://www.endurance.net/ridecamp/

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